by James Brady
THINGS went less well at the magazine. Not that I didn’t try. I had some splendid story ideas. Writers always think they know better than the editors, and now that I was the boss I’d have an opportunity to shape and inspire the entire magazine and not simply craft my own column. It just didn’t work out that way. Ten years earlier I’d realized I wasn’t much of a novelist; I now began to suspect I wasn’t going to be such a terrific editor. Having failed to become Willie Maugham, I was not going to be Henry Luce, either. Reef, with his gift for the pungent phrase, may have put it best:
“You see mate, the way we run our newspapers and magazines, the editor is paid most handsomely to anticipate the shit before anyone else even smells it.”
Bingo Marsh had that instinctive gift; it was swiftly evident that I didn’t.
Still, the editor’s job held its perquisites and small pleasures. I assigned myself to attend the French ready-to-wear collections, sitting alongside Count Vava in the huge, billowing tents set up outside the Louvre and at the Marais and wherever in Paris there was open ground, watching the models pass the collections while, just opposite, Madame Stealth sat with our sketch artists and her current Seeing Eye dog. I left the actual fashion coverage to them, of course, and focused instead on the sideshow, at times as ripely entertaining as a carnival with its dwarfs and fakirs and tattooed lady.
At one show in midcollection a summons was served to the designer by a former partner. At another fights broke out among the paparazzi, cheerfully swinging Nikons at each other for camera angles. Sylvester Stallone attended several of the shows, perched, preening, in a front-row seat while his latest girlfriend undulated past, modeling the clothes. At one collection the disco music was so loud and persistent the designer’s own wife wept openly throughout and editors cried “Assez!… enough!”
“In the sacred name of Christ and his mother,” a woman shouted, “turn it down!”
Count Vava, who had seen at least one revolution and was intermittently plotting another, was delighted, nudging me at each new offense and muttering about the decline of the West.
There was a wonderful incident at Karl Lagerfeld’s show featuring Bingo’s own nemesis, John Fairchild, where the competition for front-row seats spun out of control, with people actually exchanging blows. I scribbled furiously, trying to get the entire scene down in words. Unfortunately, just alongside, a New York Times man named Hochswender, who had a nice touch for such moments, witnessed the same outrage and got it into print first:
“At one point John Fairchild of Women’s Wear Daily gripped his program and began batting nicely dressed Frenchwomen who, as is their manner, stepped all over everybody while chirping, ‘Pardonnez-moi.’ ”
Having had my own insteps dented by their spike heels, I empathized with the irate Mr. Fairchild while recognizing how nice it was to be back in Paris, where no emotion is ever concealed. Still, it was a shame not to have had Bingo there with us to savor the marvelously wacky spectacle of his great rival assaulting the elegant.
That evening, seeking to calm my staff, to thank them for their efforts, to soothe opposing factions, I hosted a little dinner at the Grand Comptoir in les Halles. With a deceptive geniality we chatted about the affairs of the day, the clothes themselves as well as the shouting and the tumult.
“Ah,” said Madame Stealth portentously over the claret, “but isn’t the fashion show simply a metaphor for life?”
“Rubbish!” Vava exploded, bounding to his feet and knocking over glassware. “First, blind; now sodden with drink!”
The faithful Seeing Eye dog began to sob uncontrollably, and the maître d’hotel rushed to our assistance in some alarm as I tugged at the Count’s arm and urged peace.
But if Vava and Regina Stealth continued hostilities, and if many of my schemes didn’t work out, Sir Hugo was tolerant. And more. For all the vaunted bluster and vulgarity of those about him, Grottnex was turning out to be a gentleman. No backbiting, no lies, no wild exaggeration, no dodging the consequences of an action. When we disagreed it was straightforward, open, nothing of what one came routinely to expect of Bingo. In a letter to Babe I wrote, almost gushing, “Grottnex is a good and decent man.”
Competition was tougher now: this sprightly new American version of Elle, the fashion monthly created virtually overnight by Murdoch; the ever-growing popularity of Vanity Fair; a new and offbeat something called Details… Bingo would have complained, “They do these things just to annoy me. They know how upset I get.”
Grottnex understood such vast competitive enterprises were “just business.” With Grottnex there were no tantrums, no pettiness or vindictive malice.
Then, from one of our best writers, came a perfectly wonderful story out of Los Angeles, about how a cabal of local millionaires, early backers of Ronald Reagan, planned to buy a modest little Bel Air mansion and present it to the President and First Lady, free, once they’d left the White House and retired to private life. No rent would be charged; the Reagans would apparently have an option to buy, but what they were really getting was free, subsidized housing. The Chief Executive who railed against subsidized housing for the poor was feathering his own nest.
“It’s bound to get out, Shark,” the writer told me by phone. “These Kitchen Cabinet types may be able to keep their mouths shut. But not their wives. This’ll be the talk of Rodeo Drive in a couple of days.”
I scheduled the story to lead the magazine the following Monday. It was too late to change the cover art but we could get a good, big cover line on there:
“Free housing for the homeless Reagans.”
That was to be the cover line. It never appeared. Sir Hugo called me in, alerted by Reef that a politically dangerous story was about to be published in a Grottnex weekly, a story that would, quite understandably, annoy a President of the United States.
“You see, Sharkey, don’t you, this isn’t really a propitious time for our organization to irritate the Republicans.”
“Sir Hugo, this is a great story.”
“Well, you know, a retiring President, rather a nice gesture, don’t you think?”
“It’s a goddamned hustle.”
“Now that’s a bit brisk, don’t you think?”
“Sir Hugo, you weren’t here when we did that piece on Nancy Reagan getting free clothes and the loan of Harry Winston jewels. That was a great story. Sold a lot of magazines. And this thing is bigger than that…”
Hugo was polite but wouldn’t be budged. Later I learned he had a major filing before the Securities and Exchange Commission. It wasn’t time to tweak the man who gave George Bush his chance.
Reef commiserated over drinks.
“The Chief thinks the world of you, mate. He wouldn’t put up with your shit from just anyone.”
Such words were enormous consolation.
I went again to Grottnex with the proposal for a new and important series on AIDS. He listened, thoughtful, none of Bingo’s childish skipping about.
“Not really our line of country, is it, Sharkey? Important, I grant, excellent New York Times stuff. But for a slick fashion magazine?”
“Yes, I think it is. We’ve got an enormous readership in an industry riddled with AIDS. On Seventh Avenue alone…”
I lost again.
“Bad for advertising, mate,” Barrier told me. “Soft goods business is off as it is, all these mergers and such. Doesn’t help to have women out there thinking their pantyhose and bras are being sewn up by poofs with running sores, does it?”
I lost other battles, one a well-researched piece on anti-Semitism in Palm Beach, where John Weitz and the fabulously wealthy Estée Lauder were turned away from the better clubs, even as luncheon guests, bias in its rawest form. Reef again took me aside.
“Sir Hugo’s new to this country. Doesn’t want you Yanks thinking he’s the sort of bloke comes in and throws his weight around and tells Americans how to live and so forth.”
I don’t mean to imply all the stories I assigned were
noble. There was still outrage and fun and the odd bitchery. But gradually it came to me that Marsh, a coward who never stood up bravely to anyone, hadn’t killed a single story on grounds it discomfited the powerful. While Sir Hugo, a “good and decent man,” clamped down on us an iron censorship.
In a confused and frustrated funk, I thought I could hear Bingo now, hear the echoes of his silly, piping voice:
“Vex them! Vex them anew!”
84 A slap in the face of Bingo.
THEN, a loss of another sort, during a fashion show presented by, of all people, Elegant Hopkins.
One of the more salutary consequences of Bingo’s departure was that the magazine was no longer honor bound to carry on his feuds. We were now permitted to make our own enemies and to sign peace treaties with the past. In the case of the archtraitor Hopkins, after a hiatus of some years, Fashion magazine would cover his line.
“A slap in the face of Bingo,” Count Vava said gloomily. “I realize he’s gone but this is not something we should do casually.”
I agreed. In the end it was decided that Vava and I would continue to absent ourselves (“Elegant will draw the proper conclusions,” Vava felt) in tribute to Marsh’s memory. Madame Stealth would represent the magazine, accompanied by flunkies, and so, on the appointed day, off she went to 550 Seventh Avenue. Hopkins, triumphant, broke precedent by coming out early to conduct the old woman to her place in the front row, actually pulling out a little gold chair and gallantly seating her before disappearing backstage to prepare to present the collection.
“Oh, the clucking,” I was later informed by those on the scene, “Elegant Hopkins sucking up to white people. What a sensation!”
When it was over, tremendous ovations, cries of “Bravo! Bravissimo!” Elegant Hopkins prancing in delight along the runway, throwing kisses, being embraced, weeping the requisite tears of emotion, pontificating into microphones, giving his better profile to the television minicams, the usual postcollection scene. As the salon emptied, the crowd of departing journalists milling their way toward another show about to begin six floors below, Madame Stealth’s Seeing Eye dog made her way to the coat check to reclaim Madame’s wrap.
By now the showroom had nearly emptied, rolled-up programs strewn about, the routine litter of a fashion show, a workman kneeling on the pearl gray carpet of the runway with a staple gun, coping with an errant corner of carpet, the last of the TV news crews making their way noisily from the room. Madame Stealth continued to perch there on her little gold chair, staring, as she always did, in the wrong direction.
“Madame,” said the Seeing Eye dog, “I have your wrap.”
No reply. It was when she placed it around the old lady’s shoulders that Madame Stealth began to topple, very slowly, to one side.
“Madame!” the girl screamed.
It was too late. Regina Stealth had slipped through her grasp and fell to the pearl gray floor, dead.
Elegant Hopkins told the Times he read enormous significance into her passing.
“You know, in an odd way it was the closing of a circle. A childhood spent learning at her knee and then, the unfortunate and quite clearly racist enmity of her employer, shutting me and my work from the pages of their magazine. Finally, now that Marsh has been driven from the business under a cloud, for Regina, dear, faithful Regina, to return to pay homage to her one-time protégé, it almost seems poetic, quite appropriate, that at this extraordinary moment, her life would come gently to its end.”
A Post reporter asked the great man:
“Yeah, Elegant, but didja actually see the old dame croak?”
By now Hopkins could handle the tabloids as deftly as he might Vanity Fair.
“That’s the curious thing. I actually believe I did. I caught a glimpse of her face, terribly ashen, looking not at the runway but entirely in the other direction, toward the door, and then her eyes seemed slowly to close, as if blessedly in sleep, her happiness fulfilled. I noticed because I was peering through the curtain to see the reaction to number twenty-nine on the runway, and it was then I knew she was dead, because it was hardly the time to doze off, not with number twenty-nine out there, that sportive apricot blazer over the pleated flannel slacks, the one that’s just going to walk out of stores if you can believe Saks.…”
Bingo didn’t attend the funeral. It was said he was out of town.
Count Vava, who insisted, wrote the obituary for Fashion, and people for weeks after spoke of his tribute, its sensitivity and grace.
“I’ll say this,” Vava confided in me, “before her eyes went, she accurately predicted a revival of the peplum.”
His voice fell.
“And such a thing,” he went on, “is not lightly to be dismissed in fashion journalism…”
“No,” I hurriedly agreed.
“… the old bitch!”
85 A decent, God-fearing place with the finest modern plumbing.
THAT winter, President Bush took office (without naming Marsh our ambassador to France) and Bingo found the pubic hair in his bath at the Hotel Gallia.
It turned out he wasn’t in Milano attending the collections as a critic, but as a buyer, shopping for fabrics for the interiors and clothes for the staff of his latest passion.
After all and despite the odds, Bingo had purchased that famous ski resort he mentioned when first we met and about which he occasionally went on. Next door to Aspen, an entire mountainside of his own, magnificent country eight thousand feet up, a main lodge and outbuildings and a score of dollhouse cottages where they might have filmed Heidi. The place was instantly a success, People magazine doing a spread on the celebrity of its clientele, Architectural Digest on the gemütlichkeit of its public rooms, the steamy comfort of its hot tubs, the elegance of its Sister Parish–appointed suites, Gourmet magazine on the quality of service, the subtlety of its wine cellar, the qualifications of its chef. There appeared, in these magazines and others, photos of Bingo and Ames and their handsome children, suntanned and smiling against the snow. Bingo seemed to have touched up his hair, looking a decade younger. Sir Edmund Hillary, the famous alpinist and Ames’s distant cousin, was reportedly intent on spending a holiday with the Marshes, translating his perpendicular talents to skis.
I permitted myself a small resentment. Having abandoned me to struggle with the magazine he’d created and pretended to love, Marsh had now moved on smoothly, almost seamlessly, to another enormous success, a rich man growing richer. Then, early in March, in what the Associated Press termed, with considerable restraint, “an untoward incident,” Bingo Marsh was arrested.
The news came in newspapers and on television. The man who loved gossip was now gossip himself; the man who despised Brokaw and Dan Rather and Jennings found himself, and unhappily, on the evening news.
Bingo didn’t like Arabs; that was how it began as well as anyone could reconstruct the story. Of course Bingo didn’t like a lot of people. But Arabs ranked fairly high on the list, slightly above Jews and below Japanese and people with false teeth. Just how Marsh permitted himself to accept these particular Arabs at his ski resort was never satisfactorily explained. The chief Arab, Sheikh Mohammad, a Harvard man whom American pals called “Mo,” was a friend of a friend, and somehow the thing was arranged, twenty-five rooms in the main lodge and a dozen more in various cottages reserved. It was then, even before their arrival, that Marsh began to get nervous. Troublemakers, playing on his ignorance and prejudice, filled him with terrifying misinformation as well as facts, even more frightening. With his accustomed gullibility Bingo lapped up the stories that tended to reinforce beliefs, most of them erroneous, he’d held since childhood.
I remember his telling me long ago a story he’d heard from a neighbor who fought in North Africa during the war.
“These Arab gentlemen looked spotless, walking toward you in those flowing white robes. But once they passed, if you looked after them, you could see they were all brown and smelly in back, with flies droning about. Because they do
n’t have toilet tissue, as we do, so they use their robes to wipe themselves.”
Now, having accepted the Sheikh’s money, the nightmares returned. Suppose it was true there were religious taboos about using Western toilets? Suppose Mo and his entourage just squatted whenever the spirit moved them? Would their ski trousers be smelly and flyblown?
“Stop worrying,” Ames Marsh told her husband, “remember Farah Diba and the Shah at St. Moritz? The most fashionable people on the slopes.”
Bingo was briefly relieved until a helpful source explained, “The Iranians, while Moslem, are not Arabs.”
Marsh lapsed again into funk.
The entourage flew into Colorado by private jet, and a convoy of limos fetched them to Bingo’s mountain. The Sheikh himself, several aides, and a French blonde, a cover girl who may or may not have converted to Islam, arrived by chopper, landing on the sun-brilliant snow in front of the lodge. Bingo, atwitter with nerves, skipped out to meet them.
“Ah, Mr. Marsh,” said the Sheikh, hand outstretched and smiling, “what a magnificent panorama, this island in the sky of yours…”
It was a gracious opening. Anyone but Bingo would have responded with equivalent charm, conveying welcome. Instead, red-faced and pouty, voice cracking and infinitives split, Marsh blurted out with his accustomed subtlety:
“See here, Sheikh, this is a decent, God-fearing place with the finest modern plumbing. I won’t have people doing things in corners and hallways and the like.”
Mohammad, stunned and uncomprehending, took a step backward as if fearing he was about to be attacked.
“Mr. Marsh, I haven’t the foggiest notion of what you’re talking about. We’ve reserved suites and rooms, not ‘corners and…’”
“Don’t give me that. I know you fellows. And North Africa in the war. Flowing white robes all right, sure, that was up front. But behind… ah, I know all about behind… brown and smelly and flies buzzing…”
The Sheikh was glacial.
